Part Two
Part Two
The Souling | 31/10/24 | 4-7pm
Closing event, Private View and Publication Launch.
Souling is one of the oldest traditions of Halloween, and one of the first to establish the giving of treats on this day. Historically children would go from door to door, offering prayers for the souls of the dead in return for cake and a coin.
The Souling also includes joining Lucy Wright’s Dusking. All are invited to dance down the sun at 16:33, celebrating the arrival of the darkest months of the year.
Probably Cursed has been a residency that has challenged my physical making skills and has also led to a great deal of introspection, processing events of the past and being more aware of the person I am today. Ending the project with a celebration of the changing seasons and an acknowledgement of the passing of time seems oddly fitting.
The Souling is a point of contemplation and remembrance of that which has changed and those who are no longer with us. It is also a
celebration, with cake, dancing and the inevitable turn of the year.
The Dusking
The Dusking is a new tradition created by artist Lucy Wright (lucywright.art). It was created as a counterpart to the May morning dances that welcomes the arrival of summer.
As Wright says on her instagram (@lucy_j_wright): At Dusking we honour the arrival of the longer nights, and the gifts of rest, reflection and replenishments the darker months can bring... You might also want to take a moment to remember those who have left in the preceding year.
This year the Dusking has the added theme of Trust The Darkness, a reference to both the coming darker part of the year and the notion of allowing yourself to meander to a less certain destination rather than fighting to take one specific path.
Cake, Cake, Copper, Copper
There are a myriad of traditions relating to Halloween and Hallowtide, but the Sheffield custom of Caking Night is one of the clearest forebears of modern trick or treating.
Children would go door to door chanting Cake, Cake, Copper, Copper and receive a soul cake and a penny to offer prayers for the dead. Because you can’t buy your way into heaven. But you can use cake to get the local poor to offers prayers to smooth the way.
Given that this particular practice includes two of my favourite things – cake and coins – I’m resurrecting it and handing out soul cakes and old pennies. No prayers required.
Soul Cakes
Ingredients
6oz (175g) butter(or vegan alternative)
6oz (175g) caster sugar
1lb (450g) Self Raising flour
3 egg yolks (or 1 ½ mashed large bananas)
2 tsp Mixed Spice
good pinch of saffron
4oz (100g) currants (plus extra for decorating)
a little milk (or vegan alternative)
50g demerara Sugar
Method:
Preheat oven to180 C (160 Fan) Gas Mark 5
Cream the butter and sugar together til fluffy then add the egg yolks one at a time (or half a mashed banana at a time), making sure they’re well mixed.
Sift the flour & mixed spice together and stir in the saffron. Mix into the eggy/banana-y buttery goodness making sure it’s well incorporated (I find it easiest to do this in 3 batches)
Add the currants, and a little milk to make a scone like dough.
Roll out the dough to about 1.5/2cm thick and cut out rounds with a cookie cutter.
Use the back of a knife to mark a cross on the top, and (optionally) make the cross with currants.
Sprinkle demerara sugar on top
Place on lined baking sheets and bake for about 10-15 min.
Cool on a wire rack, then transfer to an airtight container.
Should keep for up to 5 days.
There once was a Lady and her Knight, who were deeply in love. One day they were riding by the riverbank and she spotted some blue flowers on the edge of the riverbank. As he grabbed them he over balanced, falling into the rushing water. Feeling himself carried away, he threw the flowers to her on the bank crying “Forget me not!”
Folk Tale
Forget-Me-Nots are associated with remembrance and true love. Unforgotten is the act of writing a remembrance in ink brewed with purple sage and lavender on paper infused with forget-me-not seeds. Anybody taking part can either take their remembrance home with them or leave to it be planted, unread, with my own paper.
Project Diary (Instagram Posts over the residency)
Learning To Stop Worrying (& Do Social Media)
Part of the residency conditions was to produce social media content. While I’m by no means a stranger to this I’ve never attempted to create content by design and it was something of a challenge!
There were two things that I really wanted to pay tribute to in the social media identity. First up, the folk horror and vintage sci-fi like The Wicker Man, Children of the Stones, Sapphire and Steel and Moondial that I grew up with and fuelled my interest in the metaphysical. Secondly, I wanted to work with the tropes and language of old jewellery advertising, especially
given that I hoped to develop this residency into a permanent strand of my practice focussing of mythology and fine metalwork.
This gave me the opportunity to include more characters and themes in the films, including the sinister but wonderfully dressed dolly standing on her music box plate and the dancers in the music box television trapped in a hall of mirrors and cursed to dance forever. The footage was heavily processed to give a sense of the uncanny and the speed of the tunes played on the music box varied from very slightly altered to each note screeching for seconds.
Although their involvement was entirely my own contrivance I suddenly felt like I had partners in crime – a sinister little family who knew how it was to labour under a curse.
Making content for Stryx also led to my realising I could do far more interesting this with my own instagram feed (@vicky.roden). I always enjoyed that type of platform for being able to post pictures with detailed captions, and putting myself a bit out of my comfort zone led to my inadvertently collecting a diary of the thought processes around many of the works.
The more interesting bits follow.
16/05/2024
A collection of metal detecting finds in preparation for #ProbablyCursed, coming up in the @cafestryx window next month.
This particular batch includes a collection of "Educational Travel" badges, french buttons, dulled mother of pearl (which still glows in a somewhat otherworldly way) and objects broken beyond their original use.
I love these objects because they're very much out of their own time, dropped and trapped in mud until they're unearthed on the narrowest of odds. None are likely very old but they have their own histories that we will never be party to.
The badges are among several examples in this batch made by H. M. Miller of Birmingham so would have been manufactured at some point before 1978. The most recent dateable object was a European cent made in 2004, giving a find date range of at least 26 years.
06/07/2024
Feeling cute, might go to the @theflapper to infuse my garments with the spirit of Metal later, IDK.....
The lengths I go to to make #ProbablyCursed items! All will be revealed in my @cafestryx window residency
Also nervous to be going to a gig like this on my own for the first time in about 15 years - my exhusband got the brum live music scene in the divorce...
If you see me out tonight say hello! I'll be the one feeling like Methusala in the corner ��
06/07/2024
I did I did go to the Flapper!
I think this is the first gig I've been to by myself in 20+ years...
I moshed for the first time since Melt Banana (and my ex told me i looked like Tra-la-la at the end of Last Exit To Brooklyn - if you know, you know)
And I have a new sonic crush in MANIFESTthey're like someone sampled the DNA of Steve Albini, Peaches and alllllll members of Cardiacs ever and made it metal.
Now on the bus home, full of RARRRGH and fuzzy lugholes.
I honestly forgot how epic live music is.
27/08/2024
Super excited that @cafestryx have allowed me to continue the #Homegrown residency until that most hallowed of dates, 31st October!
Samhain has long been one of my favourite days to make work - who could resist one of the two points in the year when the veil between realities is at it's thinnest?
Plus it means I keep getting to make new experiments such as this - a butterfly wing in UV resin. I found the deceased insect in the Autumn of 2015, and the subsequent decade (and the curing process) has made it less vibrant but no less beautiful.
Also, save the Saturday 28th September 12-3! Revised date for the artists talk ��
28/08/2024
How I Force-Rhubarbed My Favourite Pen Story time! Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin...
Just under a year ago I decided to invest in a really decent fountain pen - I love writing in ink and after my third leaky one I could do without the violet stains. I got an amazing one from @handturnedpens made from 3500 year old bog oak that wrote like a dream - til it seemingly evaporated into thin air.
And I really shouldn't be surprised- for the past
three months I've been at @cafestryx working on a residency about objects drawing from their surroundings and becoming a bit alive, making countless notes and workings through a lot of ideas with that very pen - made of 3500 year old wood.
When that oak fell into the bog it was the middle of the bronze age, Egypt was entering its biggest period of expansion, the Hittite Empire was a thing and the Tumulus culture was starting to bury its dead. The tree itself was likely around 500 years old when it fell, before spending the next three and a half millennia quietly sitting in the bog while the world was completely reshaped around it. Then it gets made into a pen, which is bought by an oddball who pours all her fancies into it and that four thousand years of existence surfaces and leads to a sauron's ring style escape from a pocket on the x8 bus (yes, I phoned lost property, no, they didn't have it).
One day it might show up again, but until then I have a near identical replacement. Cause it writes nicely. And bog oak.
I am NOT good at #Origami.
While doing some research I pulled out an old book of mine (c. 2002) that I'd written a perfectly cringe-worthy declaration of love to my ex husband (proper nausea inducing, including an "IDST!"). Urgh.
While I in no way had an abusive marriage, it was certainly toxic. Mostly I think no harm no foul, sometimes I think back to that time and wonder why I tolerated a lot of stuff. The relationship ended when I wanted to get better, and he didn't. It wasn't particularly acrimonious, just two people who had ended up at very different stages in their lives.
The #ProbablyCursed residency for @cafestryx has opened up a lot of old doors and made me face a bunch of things that just got stashed in a cluttered mental box and buried under recovery/degree/work - however this process has, in weirdly abstract ways, made me look at these things again, process my guilt around the events of fifteen years ago and let go of it. This is an example - being slapped in the face with the evidence of someone I no longer recognise as
me but know too well, and the knowledge that (at the time) I was writing an honest statement. My first impulse was to tear the page out and chuck it in the bin - but the smug IDST (If Destroyed Still True!) made that weirdly difficult.
So despite having a complete absence of patience for such things I folded the page into an origami lotus - symbolising purity, but more specifically the capacity for something wonderful to grow out of the mud and murk. Which, since getting on the path to recovery in 2008, is something I've been able to do (with masses of help from friends, family and some damn fine medical professionals).
So yes, this feels like a cursed object. But it's also so joyous- because the words weren't destroyed but transmuted into actual change, and actual progress, and a life I actually love living.
So, short of getting myself covered with levels of crap on the Thames #mudlarking or buying joblots of metal detecting finds, how do i source #ProbablyCursed items?
Charity Shops.
Because charity shops are the homes of the 'discarded-but-still-useful'. Many heirloom items find themselves in charity shops, especially those that are: Not valuable Still useful
Were much loved
Today i went round 3 charity shops in Blackheath. The photos are ALL probably cursed items, and i did get a couple of them. So! My reasoning per image:
1:We may dismiss them as dust traps, but buying and making ceramic flowers was a big deal in the quarter to mid 20th century. My Nan had a bunch of these.
2: FIGURINES! if you were born before 1984, at LEAST ONE GRANDPARENT had these. Although the two at the front are modern.
3: this chap is actually the proper mid century deal. That face. We can dispense with the probably.
4: YES these two are terrifying. YES they're giving Big Curse energy. YES they are way less cursed than they think they are. Kudos for effort, less in the way of innate horror.
5: old photographs have a high click factor on the probably-cursed-geiger-counter. This is beautiful,but a recent reprint so the innate curse level is low.
6: This lad had the pencilled initials of the maker on the bottom - definitely hand made/one of a kind which raises the curse prospects. Beautiful, too small to be useful, too well made to be useless. High curse probability.
7: it's a random wood thing. Looks to be made of walnut (or other) burl. Definitely looks like it's a 'thing'. No idea of its original use. Not sure how cursed it *actually* is, but definitely useful as a stand/facilitator to another cursed object.
8: looks incredible! Is a ramekin (possibly Gü?) in a fancy case with a tin lid. But you have all the teeny windows around and is a perfect, ready made reliquary for anything-that-fitscomfortably-in-a-ramekin
9: more frankly terrifying ceramic figures. For me, the fact of a face raises Curse probabilities.
10: Slutty ceramics with lace additions. Definitely cursed. But fucking awesome.
Don't mind me, just rearranging my crotals* ��
This Halloween I'll be participating in @lucy_j_wright's #Dusking, welcoming the dark and celebrating the changes of the past year. More and better information is available on her instagram, and all who want to join in are very welcome, drop me a DM. Not going to lie, I am beyond excited to have an excuse to prance around with bells on and there will be more sneaky previews of my costume over the next couple of weeks.
I'll be Dusking at the closing event of #ProbablyCursed at @cafestryx which finishes on 31/10/24. The beginning of Hallowtide marks the conclusion of this epic residency, which has been fulfulling and challenging in ways I did not expect but am immensely glad about.
To bid the project farewell come and join The Souling from 4-7 for a celebration of remembrances with seeds, soul cakes and the launch of new publication "Probably Cursed (or: how I learned to stop worrying and cock a snook at the universe)"
Imma be there with bells on!
* Although I love referring to these as crotal bells, technically a crotal bell only has one slit and these are more accurately jingle bells. However my inner 12 year old will always refer to these as crotal bells because JOY.
Gathering herbs by the light of the #HarvestMoon....
Preparing for the finale of #ProbablyCursed at @cafestryx in true witchy style gathering #lavender and #PurpleSage illuminated by the full moon. While it sounds like superstition there's a definite logic to this: back when most medicine relied on the active ingredients of plants, gathering them at night ensured flowers attracting evening pollinators were at full potency and prevented the sun from burning off the plants oils.
These are going to be dried out and boiled into ink to be used with dip pens to write notes of remembrance on slips of plantable forget-menot paper.
